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Jesse Kornbluth, of HeadButler.com, wildly in love this week with a recently published novel.

I don’t lose books.

But we were at a hotel in Las Vegas with a wave pool, it was 101 degrees and umbrellas cost $100. Then there was the human factor: women with tattoos across their back, women with tattoos staining their legs, women with entire sentences on their arms. With all that ink, could you remember to take a mere book from under your chaise?

To my astonishment, no one in this crowd turned “Beautiful Ruins” in to Lost & Found.

So I bought it again.

I soon understood why anyone who found it would have held on to it — it’s a stunner. Or, as they’d say at the wave pool, awesome. Very unique. A real journey of a novel.

And it’s not just one literate Vegas vacationer who thinks so. Richard Russo, no slouch as a novelist, and I agree: “Why mince words? ‘Beautiful Ruins’ is an absolute masterpiece.”

Masterpiece. A work of high quality made by a master. In this case, Jess Walter. (I’d read not a word of his until this, but his books are consistently honored: Time Magazine’s #2 novel of the year, finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the LA Times Book Prize, winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel, New York Times notable book.) Born in Spokane, he lives in Spokane. And yet he’s written the wisest, worldliest novel I’ve read this year. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

What’s it about? Italy in the 1960s, Hollywood in the 1960s, Hollywood now, World War II, the set of “Cleopatra,” the Donner party, World War II, Seattle, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Idaho — but this long list is scaring you, yes?

If the locations aren’t daunting, the massive cast might make you nervous: the proprietor of “The Hotel Adequate View,” a six-room, three-table nothing of a resort in an Italian coastal town only accessible by boat, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a Hollywood publicist turned producer, a novelist who can’t get beyond the first chapter, an unproduced screenwriter, a singer-comic, an assistant film executive whose boyfriend can be found at strip clubs, and — I almost forgot — the woman who seems to be at the center of all this, a young American actress named Dee Moray, who was briefly in “Cleopatra” and has come to this nowhere hotel because she’s been told she”s dying of cancer.

Too busy for you? And when I confess that the novel jumps around in time, do you feel you will be confused? In lesser hands, you would be. But this is a masterpiece, remember? Fifteen years in the making, many drafts. And in the end, not a foolish move.

“Beautiful Ruins” is, by turns, funny, tragic, satirical. Like life, it is always surprising. Like life, it has threads that connect unlikely people — but only in retrospect. Like life, victories are hard-won, defeats are learning experiences. And better than life, it all makes sense in the end.

I won’t quote it; it’s too hard to isolate what’s great about this novel. Because it all is. Every sentence. I know: That’s crazy talk. But “Beautiful Ruins” is one of those reading experiences that delights and challenges you along the way, thrills you often, and, at the end, makes you cry — well, makes me cry — for a world glorious enough for these characters and this writer.